US, Afghan probe claims Taliban bodies were burned

THE US military and the Afghan government said yesterday they will investigate a TV report claiming US soldiers in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters and taunted other Islamic militants.

The US military said it found the report “repugnant.”

A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said the government has launched its own inquiry.

“We strongly condemn any disrespect to human bodies regardless of whether they are those of enemies or friends,” said Karzai spokesman Karim Rahimi.

Australia’s SBS television network broadcast video that purportedly showed US soldiers burning the bodies of the suspected Taliban fighters in the hills outside the southern village of Gonbaz, near the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

The network said the video was taken by a freelance journalist Stephen Dupont who told The Associated Press he was embedded with the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade earlier this month.

Dupont said the burnings happened October 1.

In the video, which was seen by the AP, two soldiers who spoke with American accents later broadcast taunting messages that the SBS said targeted the village, believed to be harbouring Taliban soldiers.

Dupont said the soldiers responsible for the loudspeaker broadcasts were part of a US Army psychological operations unit.

The US military said the Army Criminal Investigation Division had opened an investigation into alleged misconduct that included “the burning of dead enemy combatant bodies under inappropriate circumstances.”

The SBS report suggested the deliberate burning of bodies could violate the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of enemy remains in wartime. Under the conventions, soldiers must ensure that the “dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged.”